It’s official, the 2020 CC Global Summit, to be held 19-24 October 2020, will be entirely online and free of cost! After consulting with our community, we’ve also decided to hold the event in a variety of timezones and include programming in five languages: Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, and Spanish. By doing so, we hope this virtual version of the CC Global Summit will provide the open community with an intimate and localized space to gather and connect.
After revising the CC Global Summit, we’ve decided to once again open our Call for Proposals (CFP) to better reflect the dynamics of our world today, including proposals that address issues regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and the global movement against racial injustice. This CFP also welcomes proposals that take into account the changing medium of the CC Global Summit, from an in-person gathering to a virtual event. Finally, while the official language of the event is English, we highly encourage proposals in any of the five languages we’re supporting this year: Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, and Spanish.
In this CFP, we’re asking for proposals that address the topics and issues outlined in the tracks below with a focus on actionable insights and outcomes—from case studies to workshops and storytelling sessions.
Creators of the Commons – The faces, work, and stories of those building the Commons
Powering the Commons – Exploring the tools, technology, and communities that power the Commons
Open Education and Open Scholarship– Supporting communities that practice open access to education and scholarship
Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums – Improving and expanding open access to cultural heritage
Policy and Advocacy promoting the Commons – Strategies for legal action and copyright reform
We’re very excited to host the CC Global Summit virtually this year and for the opportunity to once again gather the open community under the umbrella of learning, sharing, and creating to begin an exercise of internal reflection on how to build a more equitable, inclusive and accessible world.
The deadline for proposals is 17 July 2020. Please review the guidelines before submitting your proposal!
As part of our initiative to support multiple languages, you can view this blog post in عربى| Français| Español| 简体中文.
In theory, publishing publicly funded television content under open licenses should be a no-brainer. As with publicly funded research, open licenses improve distribution, allow for remix creativity, and unlock access to popular free knowledge platforms such as Wikipedia.
In practice, however, advocates of open licenses in the realm of public-service media face several hurdles, such as:
Standard licensing procedures in the world of public-service media do not include open licensing options and are typically limited in time and in scope.
Therefore, releasing material under an open license requires renewed rights clearing efforts with all right holders involved to reflect the conditions set out in open licenses—given the often high number of creators and right holders involved in video content production, this is a difficult, time-consuming, and costly task.
Standard remuneration rules can make open licensing unattractive for creators.
One common provision, for example, requires public service broadcasters to pay repeated fees any time material is broadcast. With an open license, there are usually no required payments. As a result, remuneration schemes have to be changed to avoid or mitigate the loss of income for creators.
European Union competition law prohibits state subsidies that may distort competition.
Usually, free and open licenses don’t pose a problem in terms of competition law as long as no special advantage for an individual market actor is associated with using an open license. Generally, public broadcasters act with great caution when it comes to competition rules and many have concerns regarding licensing arrangements that could potentially set off competition issues.
There are fears of information manipulation.
In light of recent debates on disinformation and “fake news”, public-service media fear that the content they release might be deceivingly and fraudulently manipulated so as to misrepresent facts. While Creative Commons licenses generally permit the creation of derivative works or adaptations (unless the licensor chooses to release content under a NoDerivatives license) and attribution is a requirement for all CC licenses as is a link back to the original so users can see any changes made, they do not govern defamation, disinformation or fabrication of information, which are violations dealt with outside the scope of copyright. Still, there is a reticence in public media television to openly publish content due to such threats despite the aforementioned safeguards within the CC licenses.
German public broadcaster ZDF chooses open licensing
Given these hurdles, the recent initiative by the German national public-service television broadcaster ZDF (“Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen”, literally translated as “Second German Television”) and its documentary series Terra X is remarkable. After a test run with five CC-licensed videos on issues related to climate change in the fall of 2019, the ZDF just launcheda platform with 50 explainer videos and promised to add three additional videos each week. All videos are licensed under either CC BY or CC BY-SA, making them compatible with the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia (see theZDF press release, in German).
A screenshot of the “Terra X” webpage featuring a catalog of CC-BY and CC-BY-SA explainer videos. Access the videos here.
The videos on climate change published in 2019soon found their way into prominent Wikipedia articles, such as this one onclimate change, leading to hundreds of thousands of views. This illustrates how important the posting of content on Wikipedia, which requires the use of a CC BY or CC BY-SA license, is for public service-media, as it can considerably increase the size of the audience and the media’s reach. Earlier experiments by public broadcasters with open licenses had used restrictive license modules such as the Non-Commercial (NC) or NoDerivatives (ND) CC licenses, which reached a very limited audience.
With Terra X leading the way, it will be interesting to see how the “first” German public-service television broadcasterARD will respond. Hopefully, we will see productive competition between these two public-service broadcasters that will ultimately increase the amount of content available under open licenses produced by public-service media for the benefit of users in Germany and across the world.
How often do you debate whether to share an openly licensed work on social media? If you do share a work, how often do you fret over whether you’ve provided proper attribution? I’ll answer first: All the time!
Sharing openly licensed works (e.g. images, GIFs, videos, etc.) on social platforms can feel like a fraught space to venture into—and as we’ve learned over the last few years, this is especially true for GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums). To answer some of the recurring questions these institutions have about sharing openly licensed works on their social media platforms, including works from their own collections, the copyright community at Europeana, Open GLAM, and the Special Interest Group on Intellectual Property at the Museum Computer Network organized a digital panel featuring Aleksandra Strzelichowska (Senior Online Marketing Specialist at Europeana Foundation), Mikka Gee Conway (General Counsel, the Getty Museum), and Anne Young (Director of Legal Affairs and Intellectual Property at Newfields) on 30 April 2020.
In this post, I briefly summarize a few notes from this discussion to help inform your decisions on what and how to share on social media.
Copyright policies and guidance for sharing on social media accounts
Europeana follows a four-page document that includes clear guidelines for sharing content online. Essentially, the organization only shares media that is deemed “freely re-usable,” which means it’s in the public domain (e.g. through CC0) or licensed CC BY or CC BY-SA. If a piece of content has a “no reuse statement” then Europeana will seek individual permissions from the copyright holder—but that’s a rare occurrence. The Getty Museum’s general policy is to only share copyrighted content if Getty holds the copyright license or if it can make a strong “fair use” case. Otherwise, Getty tends to focus on sharing material found in the public domain. Finally, Newfields follows a similar policy as Getty. In particular, it focuses on seeking permission for reusing works from donors, affiliated artists, and/or estates.
Policies in practice: Attribution on social media
An example from Creative Commons on giving attribution for a GIF with a CC BY-NC-ND license on Twitter. See the full example here.
Due to the nature of social media platforms, including the limited character counts, it can be difficult to provide detailed attribution for shared media. However, it’s important to make a concerted effort, particularly if the content being shared is done so under a “fair use” claim. On Twitter, for example, the best practice is to utilize the “reply” function to provide detailed attribution when necessary. On Instagram, it’s more difficult to provide proper attribution since there is no linking function in the description of posts, therefore it may be best to stick with content that is in the public domain or that the organization holds the copyrights to. To overcome this issue, Europeana created a landing page that is linked to in its biography description on Instagram. This page houses all of the images the organization posts on its Instagram account, providing source and attribution information.
For editorial pieces, like blog posts, that are housed on a website and then shared through social media, it’s important to provide attribution for openly licensed works in the body of that post. For example, the caption of an image can contain the attribution information and/or it can be added to the image’s metadata. If the image is in the public domain, it’s best practice to also identify provenance—where the work is stewarded—this includes listing the GLAM the image was sourced from. For more guidance, check out this page.
CC licenses and terms of service: What about NC-licensed content?
This can be a sticky issue for GLAM institutions, complicated by the terms of service for each individual social media platform. Some assume that if a social media platform’s terms require or indicate that a user gives the platform the license to use their content for commercial purposes (like marketing) then the spirit of the NonCommercial (NC) license is violated. Thus, the conservative approach is to avoid posting NC-licensed content.
However, there is some basis for thinking otherwise. CC Legal Counsel Sarah Pearson explained that CC licenses don’t allow sub-licensing so uploaders are not granting the platform any rights directly to content that isn’t theirs under copyright. Most social media terms of service require that a user either a) owns the copyright to their posted content or b) has the right to use that content. When that’s the case, openly licensed content is appropriate to share on the social media platform as long as the license requirements are followed by the uploader. As for NC-licensed content specifically, so long as the uploader is sharing the content for noncommercial purposes, the NC restriction is likely more of an issue for the platform, if at all, to the extent the platform must rely on the NC license.
The important role of digital asset management systems
Many organizations, especially GLAM institutions, have digital asset management systems (DAMS) that contain object metadata, including rights information, that everyone within the organization has access to. At Getty, for example, the DAMS is directly supported by a Rights and Reproduction team member that is responsible for entering objects into the system and ensuring the rights information for each object is included. Their system also includes separate folders that specify what an object can be used for, whether it’s for a blog post or a social media post. In some cases, objects are approved for use on the website or for distribution by the media but not for social media platforms, so the DAMS is crucial for ensuring those objects are not used improperly.
Newfields, which also has a DAMS, and Getty offer training to team members on how to use the system since the metadata can be complicated to read and interpret. This is particularly true when other, non-copyright issues come up for a particular object, such as privacy and/or publicity considerations. Since Europeana aggregates data, its process is more straightforward. Put simply, if the object is on the website then it should be OK to use for any purpose by the marketing and communications team.
Guidelines and strategies on how users can reuse shared content
Europeana has been educating users on reusing its content through engagement initiatives. For example, during the annual GIF IT UP! contest, it routinely educates people on open licensing and attribution requirements. If someone submits a GIF based on a work that is not openly licensed, they receive an email explaining why their submission wasn’t accepted and are given instructions on what they can do to rectify the situation. At Getty, following the launch of its open content program in 2013, the organization published a clear set of terms of use and provided additional educational resources on its website. Today, it’s looking at dedicating many of its open content to the public domain using CC0 so that there’s less confusion for users.
Open access in the age of COVID-19
The panelists agreed that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a conversation around copyright has emerged that feels especially urgent as it’s tied to this moment—specifically regarding what GLAMs should and shouldn’t do. In some cases, boundaries are definitely being pushed. However, the panelists urged institutions to take a more cautious and measured approach when embarking on new digital projects and initiatives. “I definitely feel that it’s important to be measured about all this, and think about what it is exactly about our changed situation that might merit pushing boundaries of copyright?,” Mikka argued. “That is absolutely true,” Anne replied, “…at the end of the day, while there might be pushing some boundaries we still need to proceed cautiously because the laws [themselves] haven’t changed.”
P.s. I highly recommend reading the full conversation for more insights and examples from Europeana, Getty, and Newfields—and bookmarking it for future reference!
Our friends over at Open GLAM want to hear from you! How do you attribute openly licensed works on social media? What challenges are you facing in this area? What training or education are you looking for? Let them know by sending an email, tweeting at OpenGlam, or joining their monthly calls!
We are very excited to announce the publication of the official translations of the CC License Suite 4.0 and CC0 into Slovenian. These legal code translations are the products of years of painstaking work by a team of volunteers at the Intellectual Property Institute in Slovenia, led by Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič. The first drafts were finished in November 2018, and the public comment period for the translations was held in April 2019. Once the substance of the translations was finalized, the team then worked closely with the internal team at CC to perfect the HTML versions of the translations.
During this time, Matija Šuklje translated all of the deeds associated with these legal tools.
We want to give a special thanks to Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič, Saša Krajnc, and Tilen Zonta for their persistence and patience throughout this lengthy process.
Creative Commons offers solidarity and joins the millions around the world who are mourning the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, Ahmaud Arbery, and others. We recognize that they are the latest victims of systemic racism and institutionalized violence not only in the United States but globally, prompting anti-racism and anti-police brutality protests in over 30 countries; from Australia to Mexico to Turkey. CC stands with those grieving and protesting against these injustices against Black people, and with those fighting for justice, representation, and equality around the world.
Our community continually challenges us to be more critical of the social, political, legal, and economic systems in which we work. At last year’s CC Global Summit, open community members Adele Vrana and Siko Bouterse encouraged us to ask, “Whose Knowledge?” This simple yet important question challenged us to face the persistent injustices and inequalities that have infected the internet since its creation, leading to some voices being raised and others being silenced. Of course, this digital world is a reflection—and sometimes a magnification—of our physical world, and the issues and barriers people regularly encounter online often mirror their realities offline.
As a leader in the open internet and open access movement, we recognize our responsibility to counter discrimination and racism within ourselves, our organization, our global network, and the communities in which we participate. We must do more to lend our allyship and resources to help end the centuries of injustice that have led to the murder and oppression of Black, Indigenous, and people of color across the globe.
After revising the CC Global Summit, we’ve decided to once again open our Call for Proposals (CFP) to better reflect the dynamics of our world today, including proposals that address issues regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and the global movement against racial injustice. This CFP also welcomes proposals that take into account the changing medium of the CC Global Summit, from an in-person gathering to a virtual event. Finally, while the official language of the event is English, we highly encourage proposals in any of the five languages we’re supporting this year: Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, and Spanish.
As part of our initiative to support multiple languages, you can view this blog post in عربى | Français | Español | 简体中文. 
